Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Madame ZeeZee’s Nightmare, Unfinished, Light Bringer, Daughter Am I, More Deaths Than One, and A Spark of Heavenly Fire. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.”

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Never Changing. Never the Same.

August 26, 2015 — Pat Bertram

I went for a three-hour beach walk yesterday. It was perfect timing, with low tide at the mid point of my hike so I mostly had hard wet sand to walk on. It was also a perfect ocean day, cloudy and foggy, and so cool I needed to wear a windbreaker and a scarf around my neck.

For all those hours, the scene never changed — the sea on one side of me, the grass-covered dunes on the other, the sand in front of me, all narrowing to a single point in the distance. It almost seemed as if I were on a treadmill, going nowhere. And yet the scene was ever changing — birds came into view and left, waves of various intensities broke on shore, an assortment of shells and gravel littered the sand.

This never-changing / never-the-same view made me think of us and how we always seem to be the same and yet we are always changing, at least our view point is changing. I don’t know how much we can change fundamentally. At rock bottom, beneath our emotions and our mental chatter, we are awareness, and awareness simply is. But our viewpoint changes with every new challenge, with every widening of our horizons.

I feel as if I should add to this piece, fill out the thought, add a pithy comment or a bit of wit, but apparently, this is the totality of my insight.

Never changing. Never the same.

***

(Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.”)

Books by Pat Bertram

Available online wherever books and ebooks are sold.

Grief: The Great Yearning is not a how-to but a how-done, a compilation of letters, blog posts, and journal entries Pat Bertram wrote while struggling to survive her first year of grief. This is an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.

While sorting through her deceased husband’s effects, Amanda is shocked to discover a gun and the photo of an unknown girl who resembles their daughter. After dedicating her life to David and his vocation as a pastor, the evidence that her devout husband kept secrets devastates Amanda. But Amanda has secrets of her own. . .

When Pat’s adult dance classmates discover she is a published author, the women suggest she write a mystery featuring the studio and its aging students. One sweet older lady laughingly volunteers to be the victim, and the others offer suggestions to jazz up the story. Pat starts writing, and then . . . the murders begin.

Thirty-seven years after being abandoned on the doorstep of a remote cabin in Colorado, Becka Johnson returns to try to discover her identity, but she only finds more questions. Who has been looking for her all those years? And why are those same people interested in fellow newcomer Philip Hansen?

When twenty-five-year-old Mary Stuart learns she inherited a farm from her recently murdered grandparents -- grandparents her father claimed had died before she was born -- she becomes obsessed with finding out who they were and why someone wanted them dead.

In quarantined Colorado, where hundreds of thousands of people are dying from an unstoppable, bio-engineered disease, investigative reporter Greg Pullman risks everything to discover the truth: Who unleashed the deadly organism? And why?

Bob Stark returns to Denver after 18 years in SE Asia to discover that the mother he buried before he left is dead again. At her new funeral, he sees . . . himself. Is his other self a hoaxer, or is something more sinister going on?